Images are often the largest and most overlooked part of a migration. Get them wrong and you ship a store with broken thumbnails, lost alt text and pages that fail Core Web Vitals. Get them right and the migration is an opportunity to make the whole catalog faster. Here is how to approach it.
Inventory what you actually have
Before moving anything, catalog your images: product shots and their variants, lifestyle and content images, blog media, and any hotlinked or externally hosted assets. Note which carry meaningful alt text and filenames, because those are SEO signals you do not want to discard.
Preserve associations, alt text and filenames
The value in images is not just the file, it is the metadata and the link to the right product. Migrate images with their alt text and descriptive filenames intact, and keep each image attached to the correct product and variant. Losing alt text strips accessibility and image-search value; losing associations means a manual re-matching nightmare.
Handle image URLs and redirects
Moving to Shopify means images move to its CDN, so their URLs change. Indexed or hotlinked images can 404 if ignored. Redirect the important image URLs, update references in migrated content, and resubmit image sitemaps so Google recrawls the new locations. This is part of the wider redirect work in SEO preservation.
Optimize on the way in
A migration is the ideal time to fix image weight. Right-size images to their display dimensions, convert to modern formats, and ensure the primary product image is set up as the LCP element so product pages load fast. Shopify serves responsive images from its CDN, but only if the source assets are not enormous originals.
Validate before and after
After import, check that every product has its images, that alt text survived, and that no broken references remain in content. A quick crawl for missing images catches problems before customers do. Image gaps are highly visible, so they belong in your pre-launch testing.
Images are rarely the reason a migration is chosen, but they are frequently the reason one looks broken on launch day. The Shopify migration hub covers how this fits the overall plan.